SnoopyStyle Raimund Gregorius (Jeremy Irons) is a teacher in Bern, Switzerland. He saves a young woman from jumping off a bridge. She disappears leaving behind her red coat. The coat leads to a book and a train ticket. Hoping to find the woman at the train station, he abandons his class. When she doesn't show up, he decides to use the train ticket to Lisbon. There he finds the book's late author Amadeu do Prado's sister (Charlotte Rampling). He follows the story of Amadeu's rebellion against his father and society during the revolutionary 70's.Granted, there are great veteran actors in this movie. Most of whom are in the present day story but most of the drama happens in the past. This dichotomy leaves a hollowness to the story telling. It's hard to understand Raimund's motives. He doesn't seem to care about the young woman from the bridge or at least, he rarely mentions her until she literally tracks him down. Quite frankly, the character doesn't really understand himself. The movie is better off abandoning all the flashbacks and simply go back to the 70's to tell Amadeu's story. This is structurally flawed. His search should be as much about the girl as it is about a long dead author.

slicky-407-174807 You stop being genuinely interested in what's going on on the screen after 5 minutes. The plot is nonexistent, the dialogues are just so artificial you wonder how on Earth anyone from the cast could even bother to take part in this.... And why all the characters had to speak that broken English? You literally struggle to understand the muttering and when you do, you wish you didn't. Why secret police officers wear black leather jackets all the time? What's the point of making such a movie? Did they want to show Lisbon? Talk about dictator regime? Earn some retirement money for Mr. Irons? I'd never know.... It's hard to even right 10 lines for a review after seeing this. But I had to make it to save other's time.

simondclinch-1 I am angry with at least six thousand of you who voted less than 7 (the minimum I normally have time to watch) and caused me delay in finding this wonderful film. Maybe I should submine the IMDb database so that I can cross-reference your votes on other films and generate my own ratings in a numberscape void of your numbscape. That said, I can now begin my review. It is often said that a film is usually inferior to the book on which it is based. And whereas this tendency is almost a de facto weakness, such films must be made at all costs, because films that are not based on any book tend on average to be worse. In this case, the skill of the original novelist explodes early on screen as the words of a fictitious novel that is central to the plot. There is an old joke, 'what is the difference between heaven and hell?' that compares the weaknesses and strengths of different European nationals. For example, in heaven the Italians are the lovers and the Swiss are the bankers and in hell the roles are reversed. Having lived in Switzerland, I have to disagree with such stereotypes. And indeed, this story does a good job in exploding such myths, for the central character is Swiss and while demonstrating a quiet, deferential manner, reveals increasingly the intense passion he feels as the story unfolds, as indeed it does for the viewer, who should I would hope empathise to some degree.It is almost a rule of novel-writing that a story be told in the words of its characters. Films rarely manage to include the unspoken words, but this masterpiece uses many clever tricks to work around that problem seamlessly, that is to say, without exposing the inner workings of the writer's kitchen.The story begins in Bern where a teacher on his way to school encounters a Portuguese woman about to kill herself and who has also dropped a book on the ground. And from there all the way to the end and actually beyond, the film jumps headfirst into the depths of mystery. The teacher (Irons) follows a trail of clues laid out in the book from Bern to Lisbon, unfolding a story from the past of romance and revolution underpinned by eloquent passages of philosophical thought. I say that instead of philosophy, because they are very different things. A philosopher is a person who seeks answers to questions about fundamental laws and the human condition, whereas philosophy is the bureaucracy of categorizing such answers without understanding them beyond a level too superficial to be called philosophical.Needless to say, it was the words of Amadeu, the fictional writer at the centre of this story that lifted me to such a philosophical level. I cannot recall watching a film quite like it!Of course it helps to have a superstar cast which also was not apparent from the IMDb header! One either has to read the whole cast list or watch the film to realise how many heavy hitters are hiding in there!

Leofwine_draca I'm not really a fan of modern day literary stuff, as I find it all very pretentious, overrated, and more than a little arty farty. This is very much a highbrow literary thriller about an aged professor who takes a trip to Portugal to uncover a story about one man's fight against that country's historical dictatorship.I wasn't expecting to like this one very much and indeed it doesn't do much to thrill. It's a very self-conscious production that goes out of its way to feel like an "actor's movie", but the problem is that it's so slow and long winded that it doesn't hold the attention. I like Jeremy Irons as an actor, but his character here is dull and his modern-day scenes don't deserve to occupy more than half the running time as they feel irrelevant.The historical story is better, as it has some fine actors in crucial parts, not least the continually underrated Jack Huston (BOARDWALK EMPIRE). There are also superior roles for August Diehl (so memorable in INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS) and Bruno Ganz (NOSFERATU THE VAMPYRE) playing younger and older versions of the same character. However, the most welcome part is a small one from an entirely professional Christopher Lee in one of his last screen appearances, and indeed his presence is the reason I tuned in.